Speeches by Hinds.

“The evidence will never be perfect on this subject, because this is an effect that is happening right around the world at the same time—there is no control group. Countries are now acting—it is not only Australia; other countries are moving in this direction as well—and I welcome today’s announcement. The Secretary of …”

“The question I really want to come on to is, who does that co-ordination across the Government, and how good they are? In particular, DCMS is famously not a big Department in Government. It is not a Department with a huge amount of heft or—all these budgets are big budgets—that big a budget in the scheme of things, com…”

“I want to come back to the projection of Britain abroad and soft power, and to ask Jason and Simon about it. It is a question that comes up with lots of sectors that this Committee covers, whether it is general tourism, music or film exports, or what have you. Everyone has a great story to tell about soft power until y…”

“Sorry.”

“The Tattoo is up there with the Farnborough Air Show and stuff. It has a special and particular place in the military ecosystem.”

“Sorry.”

“I do not want to interrupt you or be difficult—that is all about that event, and you can talk about the Greater Manchester authority or the Liverpool city region—but you were talking earlier about co-ordinating so that we fill hotel rooms in January and on Sunday nights, the police force are not trying to be in five di…”

“Why hasn’t it happened?”

“Okay. I want to make sure that everybody gets a chance to say what this guidance should be. But the challenge back to you, Sam, would be that that is all very well, but that is expecting every mother and father in the land to be an expert on neurodevelopment, to be able to categorise different pieces of content and to …”

“Hang on—I think this is going to be advice to parents. If you say, “This whole industry should go away and do something different,” good luck, but that is at one remove, and you are dealing with people in another jurisdiction. If there is going to be advice to families—I hope it will be from either the Department for E…”

“Let’s put any of the three of you in the policymaker’s chair. We heard, I think, yesterday that there is now going to be guidance on screen time and content type for babies and toddlers. Given that somebody will have to come up with something in pretty short order, and all this research cannot be short-circuited, …”

“A couple of months ago, I put a parliamentary question to the Government to ask what research they had commissioned on the effect of media on babies and toddlers. The answer that came back was, “Well, we expect the platforms to do a risk assessment and think about the effect it will have on children.” In other words, i…”

“Exactly.”

“Sorry?”

“Obviously, academic independence and freedom are also very important; you cannot only be working to the requirements of Government or some agency. We are going to be writing a report with recommendations. Would a recommendation of yours be that, say, annually there should be some, probably publicly available, discussio…”

“Can I put to you the proposition that is not realistic in an algorithmically driven system to say that parents should control what their children watch? Even if a lot of the time you do manage to co-view—let’s say you have three children; as it happens, I do—it is not physically possible to be there all the time, with …”

“It was kind of a rhetorical question. My hypothesis is that that person does not exist, because it is not physically possible. However well educated you are, you just cannot be on top of all these different systems. They all have their own individual parental controls. TikTok says, “We have parental controls”—well that…”

“To any of you, have you ever met a parent who has used every parental control available to them—with two or three children, two different operating systems, three different Meta apps, two different Google apps? Have you ever met anybody who has mastered parental controls? And can you introduce me to them? We will have …”

“I realise I am stretching our Chair’s patience a little bit, as this is only one follow-up question, but can I ask one more?”

“Okay. Quickly to Gemma, is there any evidence on the Turn on the Subtitles campaign? Is it beneficial to very young children to have the subtitles when they are hearing speech on the television?”